X, formerly called Twitter, is an online social media and social networking service operated by the American company X Corp., the successor of Twitter, Inc. On X, registered users can post text, images and videos. Users can also like, repost, quote repost, comment on posts, direct message, video and audio call, bookmark, join lists and communities, and join public Spaces with other registered users. Users can vote on context added by approved users using the Community Notes feature. Posting information to the site is often referred to historically as tweeting, retweeting and quote tweeting/retweeting. Although the service is now called X, the primary website address remains twitter.com as of November 2023, with the x.com domain name redirecting to that address.
X Pro, formerly known as TweetDeck, is a paid proprietary social media dashboard for management of X accounts. Originally an independent app, TweetDeck was subsequently acquired by Twitter Inc. and integrated into Twitter's interface. It had long ranked as one of the most popular Twitter clients by percentage of tweets posted, alongside the official Twitter web client and the official apps for iPhone and Android.
Google Play, also known as the Google Play Store and formerly Android Market, is a digital distribution service operated and developed by Google. It serves as the official app store for certified devices running on the Android operating system and its derivatives, as well as ChromeOS, allowing users to browse and download applications developed with the Android software development kit (SDK) and published through Google. Google Play has also served as a digital media store, offering games, music, books, movies, and television programs. Content that has been purchased on Google Play Movies & TV and Google Play Books can be accessed on a web browser and through the Android and iOS apps.
Vine was an American short-form video hosting service where users could share six-second-long looping video clips. It was originally launched on January 24, 2013, by Vine Labs, Inc. Bought by Twitter, Inc. in 2012 before its launch, the service was shut down on January 17, 2017, and the app was discontinued a few months later.
Twitter, Inc. was an American social media company based in San Francisco, California. The company operated the social networking service Twitter and previously the Vine short video app and Periscope livestreaming service. In April 2023, Twitter merged with X Holdings and ceased to be an independent company, becoming a part of X Corp.
Signal is an encrypted messaging service for instant messaging, voice, and video calls. The instant messaging function includes sending text, voice notes, images, videos, and other files. Communication may be one-to-one between users, or for group messaging.
Periscope was an American live video streaming app for Android and iOS developed by Kayvon Beykpour and Joe Bernstein and acquired by Twitter, Inc. before its launch in March 2015.
Mastodon is a free and open-source software for running self-hosted social networking services. It has microblogging features similar to Twitter, which are offered by a large number of independently run nodes, known as instances or servers, each with its own code of conduct, terms of service, privacy policy, privacy options, and content moderation policies.
Deplatforming, also known as no-platforming, has been defined as an "attempt to boycott a group or individual through removing the platforms used to share information or ideas", or "the action or practice of preventing someone holding views regarded as unacceptable or offensive from contributing to a forum or debate, especially by blocking them on a particular website."
COVIDSafe was a digital contact tracing app released by the Australian Government on 26 April 2020 to help combat the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The app was intended to augment traditional contact tracing by automatically tracking encounters between users and later allowing a state or territory health authority to warn a user they have come within 1.5 metres with an infected person for 15 minutes or more. To achieve this, it used the BlueTrace and Herald protocol, originally developed by the Singaporean Government and VMWare respectively, to passively collect an anonymised registry of near contacts. The efficacy of the app was questioned over its lifetime, ultimately identifying just 2 confirmed cases by the time it was decommissioned on 16 August 2022.
On July 15, 2020, between 20:00 and 22:00 UTC, 130 high-profile Twitter accounts were reportedly compromised by outside parties to promote a bitcoin scam. Twitter and other media sources confirmed that the perpetrators had gained access to Twitter's administrative tools so that they could alter the accounts themselves and post the tweets directly. They appeared to have used social engineering to gain access to the tools via Twitter employees. Three individuals were arrested by authorities on July 31, 2020, and charged with wire fraud, money laundering, identity theft, and unauthorized computer access related to the scam.
Koo is an Indian microblogging and social networking service, owned by Bangalore-based Bombinate Technologies. It was co-founded by entrepreneurs Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka. The app was launched in early 2020; it won the government's Atmanirbhar App Innovation Challenge which selected the best apps from some 7,000 entries across the country.
Bluesky, also known as Bluesky Social, is a microblogging social platform and a public benefit corporation based in the United States. Jay Graber serves as the company's CEO, while Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and XMPP creator Jeremie Miller sit on its board of directors.
Truth Social is an alt-tech social media platform created by Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), an American media and technology company founded in October 2021 by former US president Donald Trump. It has been called a "Twitter clone" that competes with Parler, Gab, and Mastodon in trying to provide an alternative to Twitter and Facebook.
Business magnate Elon Musk initiated an acquisition of American social media company Twitter, Inc. on April 14, 2022, and concluded it on October 27, 2022. Musk had begun buying shares of the company in January 2022, becoming its largest shareholder by April with a 9.1 percent ownership stake. Twitter invited Musk to join its board of directors, an offer he initially accepted before declining. On April 14, Musk made an unsolicited offer to purchase the company, to which Twitter's board responded with a "poison pill" strategy to resist a hostile takeover before unanimously accepting Musk's buyout offer of $44 billion on April 25. Musk stated that he planned to introduce new features to the platform, make its algorithms open-source, combat spambot accounts, and promote free speech.
The Twitter Files are a series of releases of select internal Twitter, Inc. documents published from December 2022 through March 2023 on Twitter. CEO Elon Musk gave the documents to journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, and authors Michael Shellenberger, David Zweig and Alex Berenson shortly after he acquired Twitter on October 27, 2022. Taibbi and Weiss coordinated the publication of the documents with Musk, releasing details of the files as a series of Twitter threads.
On December 15, 2022, Twitter suspended the accounts of ten journalists who have covered the company and its owner, Elon Musk. They included reporters Keith Olbermann, Steven L. Herman, and Donie O'Sullivan, and journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and The Intercept. The suspensions came after an incident that occurred on December 14, when a stalker followed Elon's 2-year-old son while he was traveling in a car by a stalker who thought Elon was in the car. Musk said the accounts had violated a policy on doxxing. Posters on behalf of the owners of the accounts were quick to claim that the suspensions were permanent before Musk clarified account access would be restricted for seven days. Some of the accounts were restored earlier.
Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter in October 2022; Musk acted as CEO of Twitter until June 2023 when he was succeeded by Linda Yaccarino. Twitter was then rebranded to X in July 2023. Initially during Musk's tenure, Twitter introduced a series of reforms and management changes; the company reinstated a number of previously banned accounts, including former U.S. President Donald Trump, reduced the workforce by approximately 80%, closed one of Twitter's three data centers, and largely eliminated the content moderation team, replacing it with the crowd-sourced fact-checking system Community Notes.
Spoutible is a social media and social networking service created by Christopher Bouzy, the founder of the Twitter analytics service Bot Sentinel. It launched in February 2023.
Threads is an online social media and social networking service operated by Meta Platforms. The app offers users the ability to post and share text, images, and videos, as well as interact with other users' posts through replies, reposts, and likes. Closely linked to Meta platform Instagram and additionally requiring users to both have an Instagram account and use Threads under the same Instagram handle, the functionality of Threads is similar to X. The application is available on iOS and Android devices; the web version offers limited functionality and requires a mobile app install first. It is the fastest-growing consumer software application in history, gaining over 100 million users in its first five days, surpassing the record previously set by ChatGPT. Its early success was not sustained and the user base of the app plummeted more than 80% to 8 million daily active users by the end of July.
